EW Watches the Watchmen

I’m still not breathing right since Thursday’s Watchmen-a-thon and I’ve been updating this site like crazy and trying to stay on top of all of the news.

I managed to get all of the new EW Watchmen movie photos into this site’s Movie Photos section, and now I’m going to try to summarize the three big Watchmen articles they published on their site last week.

Their stories on the upcoming movie had some revealing tidbits for fans, the most important being more clues about the faithfulness of the film’s ending to it’s comic counterpart.

First, one of the articles states that the movie is “preserving the villain-doesn’t-pay-for-his-crimes climax” which is good to hear, but then explains that “the catastrophic climax is different” and that “a timely subplot about alternative fuels” has been added. Translation? Hard to say. But if the alternative fuels discussed here is the “world universal energy” mentioned by Snyder in the past, the fact that it’s only a subplot could mean the fan hated Dr. Manhattan related ending that appeared in early script drafts may not have made it into the film either.

One theme that was present throughout the EW coverage was how determined director Zack Snyder is to deliver a Watchmen movie that serious fans of the book would be proud of, and his struggle with WB to keep, what he feels are, critical scenes in the final cut:

I keep telling them, 'Guys, I can't take this out! Don't you understand?! If I f--- this up, I might as well start making romantic comedies!' You can't make it into something else, you really can't. It's not Fantastic Four, it's got to be hard R, it's got to challenge everyone's ideas. When they say, ''You should be less sexy and less violent,'' I say, ''But that's Watchmen.''

But even Snyder knows compromises must be made and he hopes that, even if some of their favorite moments end up on the cutting room floor, he hopes “Watchmenphiles will cut him a little slack.” He explains:

They have a chance to support something that I think legitimizes the superhero-movie genre for everyone who says superhero movies are stupid, popcorn bulls---,'' he says. ''Hopefully, Watchmen can get in their faces and change their minds.

EW also interviewed Alan Moore and when they asked him whether he was interested in what Zack Snyder and the Watchmen movie he told them, “I would rather not know.” Moore also lambasted Snyder’s 300, saying,

…it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid.

When Snyder was asked if there was ever a chance for Alan Moore to be involved with the movie, he said:

That bridge had been burned before we got involved. Maybe it's a good thing — he probably would have talked me out of it. Alan's a genius, and his book is a genius. If my movie is an advertisement for the book, great. If it's anything else, then I f---ed up. I hope people see the movie and go, ''I gotta read that book,'' because the ideas are crazy. ''Can those ideas possibly be in that book?'' Yeah — and a jillion other ones that I couldn't even get near.

One thing fans can look forward to is seeing more footage from Watchmen at next week’s Comic Con in San Diego. He’s also hoping that the fans will help him gauge the thing that might need a bit of tweaking:

Comic-Con fans have become the gatekeepers of pop culture. You test these movies there. So I'm going to go down there and say, ''Hey, what do you guys think?'' If they're going to go, ''What the f--- is this?'' that's fine! That's part of the process. A genre fan, a comic-book movie fan, is worth 20 normal fans. They blog, talk, buy. For them, a movie is a life experience. The special piece that I've cut for Comic-Con, it's designed to let them know that I care about this book.